


Windows to the Soul

by AstroGirl



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-18
Updated: 2012-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-21 10:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At almost the last moment, Regina changes her mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Windows to the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Although this is an AU for the second episode, it does contains spoilers up through S2's "Queen of Hearts."

"You know what you love," he says. "Now go kill it."

She knows. Of course she does. 

She looks into Rumplestiltskin's eyes, inches from her own, and imagines killing her father. Imagines plunging her hand into his chest and ripping out his heart. It's easy enough. She's killed everything else she's ever loved, one way or another. Why should the man who stood by and watched it happen be any exception?

Well. It seems she has what she came for. She pulls back slowly, her thoughts already far away, in another life, another realm. Behind the spikes that bar his cell, Rumplestiltskin grins, but she barely sees him. He's played his part, and now he, too, is nothing to her. _Except..._

It's pure chance that she catches it, the brief, faint flicker that lights his ugly eyes as she turns away. But once glimpsed, it cannot be ignored, cannot be denied. Beneath the face he shows to her, beneath the tittering mania and the condescension and the ever-present greed for one more deal, she has seen, just for a moment, a naked, unmistakable gleam of _triumph_.

A sick, cold feeling washes over her. She stops and grabs hold of the bars, her body pressing hard against the cage as she tries to understand why everything suddenly feels wrong. It occurs to her, at last, that there are questions she's never asked. That she's never _wanted_ to ask. 

"Why have you been helping me?" she says, more calmly than she wants to. "You _want_ this curse to succeed. Why? What's in it for you?"

He tilts his head at her, his expression that of a teacher disappointed with an idiot pupil. "Why do you _think_ , dearie?" He twirls his hand to indicate the cage that surrounds him.

She lets out a short, sharp laugh. "You want out of this prison? Really? Enough to give up your power? Your _identity_? To live in a world where I'm the one in charge?"

He bares his teeth in a mockery of a smile and wags his finger at her. "Not if I say _please_."

The deals with him that seem the easiest to keep are always the most dangerous. She should have remembered that. There are probably a lot of things she should have remembered. "How long have you been planning this?" she hisses.

He adopts an expression of offended innocence, begins to protest the accusation. "Really, dearie--"

She cuts him off before he finishes the next syllable. " _How long?_ "

He changes tactics with a shrug, but there's nothing casual about the way he's looking at her now. "What does it matter? As long as I get what I want--" He points to himself, then reaches through the bars to rest a fingertip above her heart. "--and you get what you want. Hmm?"

"And what you want is?"

"My business." He smiles. "Nothing to do with you, I assure you."

Something hot and bitter rises up in the back of her throat. _Nothing to do with her_. Of course. So much for _her_ revenge. So much for finally having control over everything that's ever hurt her. 

"I'm not your puppet," she says, trying to ignore the way her gut clenches when the contempt in his eyes tells her he thinks otherwise. "We're through here. If you want the curse so badly, cast it yourself."

"Careful dearie," he says. "You might not like where you end up if I'm the one doing it."

She laughs. "Empty threats, Rumple? That's not like you." She leans forward. Her grip tightens around the bars until pain flares through her hands, until numbness replaces it. "We both know why you couldn't do it yourself." She drops her voice to a mock-pitying whisper. "There's no one in this world that Rumplestiltskin loves."

She thought once, when she was young and foolish, that he might care for her, in his own harsh, inhuman way. That he taught her magic because he _understood_. That he saw something strong in her.

She has never hated him more than she does in this moment.

"You want to know something?" she says. Her lips are nearly against his ear, her voice silken and cold. "You're wrong about that."

She flicks her fingers -- a dramatic gesture that, even as she makes it, she remembers with a lurch that she learned from _him_ \-- and, in a swirl of black-and-purple mist, a figure appears behind her.

That stunned look in his eyes is almost as sweet, almost as painful, as that brief moment when she believed she held Snow White's heart in her hand.

"Rumplestiltskin?" The girl's voice is thick with confusion, but surprisingly unafraid. "What's going on?" She tries to move forward, to go to him, but Regina's magic holds her fast.

Rumplestiltskin lets out a strangled, inarticulate cry, startlingly unlike any sound Regina has ever heard him make. In a blur almost too swift to follow, he whirls around, snatches something from a hole in the wall of the cell. When he turns back, there's a parchment in his hands, words flowing off it in a dark, inky cloud.

Regina finds herself holding onto nothing, the bars in the center of the cell gone as if they had never existed. All true, then. It's all true. Nothing has ever been real but his manipulation.

She raises her hands, prepared to fight him, but he rushes past her, towards the still-disoriented girl. He touches her shoulder as if having trouble convincing himself she's real. "If you've hurt her--" he spits.

"Me?" She gives him her sweetest, most poisonous smile, touches her hand to her chest as if he's wounded her. "No, of course not. I thought I'd leave that to you, _dearie_. If you've got the stomach for it. Have fun casting your curse."

In a swirl of black skirts, she strides past him. He lets out a howl and lurches towards her, but the girl pulls him back, begs him to stop. Pathetically, he does.

Huh. And here she'd thought he might actually do it. Regina feels an unexpected pang of regret, whether at being deprived of this revenge as well, or of a fleeting chance at forgetfulness, she really doesn't know. Either way, she suppresses it with cold and practiced ease.

She shakes her head at him, and clucks her tongue, and walks away without looking back. 

He'll come after her, of course, to kill her or to deal with her, or both. Let him. She's not afraid of him, and she doesn't need him. It's clear to her now which of them is better at this.

Her mother was right. Love _is_ a weakness.


End file.
